Brief Encounter

Brief Encounter, David Lean's 1946 film adaptation of Noel Coward's 1936 play Still Life, is one of the all-time great tearjerkers. It's a subtle and sophisticated treatment of the slow-burn agony felt by two people who want to be lovers but can't bring themselves to throw over their obligations to their existing families. Treating such material with anything but reverence --- let alone injecting it with musical numbers, film clips, slapstick comedy, and fantasy sequences --- would seem like a certain disaster, but the production from Kneehigh Theatre currently at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo is the opposite: a dazzling re-imagining of the material that is not so much a different staging as it is a new play entirely, one about what it's like to watch stories like Brief Encounter unfold.

With a wealth of ingenious stage trickery --- some of which elicited outright gasps from the audience --- the production surrounds the core story, told and acted with heartfelt seriousness, with active spectators whose own romantic relationships present alternatives to the heartbreak happening front and center. The feelings that Laura and Alec want so badly to express (or rather, that the audience wants them to express) get dramatized in fantasy and externalized in the other characters, to charming and even transporting effect. But the tragedy of Laura and Alec's story never gets overwhelmed by the razzle-dazzle. At times, in fact, it is almost more affecting than in the original: the scene in which they dress each other when they want so badly to do the opposite is made even more sweetly sad by being set to Coward's song "Go Slow, Johnny." By the end of the night, when Laura's husband says, "Thank you for coming back to me," it feels not only like a moving revelation of his awareness of her pain, but a declaration of gratitude from the audience for the re-enchantment of the stage.



Photos: thanks